


The Cat and the Hermit

by Ebony_Draygon



Category: Gloryhammer (Band), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Childhood Memories, First Meetings, Gen, Headmistress Minerva McGonagall, Sub-commander Ralathor, Young Minerva, dimension hopping, hermit Ralathor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:47:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24289150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ebony_Draygon/pseuds/Ebony_Draygon
Summary: Minerva McGonagall was a bright witch for her age. When she meets a mysterious hermit she can’t help but insist on getting answers from him
Comments: 6
Kudos: 9





	The Cat and the Hermit

Minerva McGonagall was considered a bright girl for her age. The adults of the village in her home of Caithness were quick to praise her parents on how bright their daughter was, getting into a posh and exclusive boarding school. Of course, they were not aware that the boarding school in question taught her how to turn matchsticks into needles and had a ceiling that reflected the sky outside. Such things were not talked about after all. Even her father, a muggle vicar, struggled to understand the magic and majesty his only daughter commanded.

That was why she was out in the fields to do her charms and history of magic homework. She was keen to get a leg up before the start of her second year at Hogwarts.The skritch of her quill was the only sound beyond the low moan of the breeze and the call of the birds. 

Minerva stopped and looked up. She couldn’t hear the sounds of the sheep that would normally be meandering the hillside, or the faint sounds of her brothers playing in the garden back home. Raising a hand to her ear she snapped her fingers. No, she could still hear that just fine. Putting down her parchment she stood up and shaded her eyes to look out across the field. There were the sheep, flocked near the far gate. There were her brothers, playing tag in the garden, tiny figures on the edge of her vision. And yet not a sound from either of them. Sitting down she rummaged through her bag and pulled out her charms book. Was this a silencing charm? No, that was cast on a person not an area. As she flicked through the pages of her book she became aware of another presence beside her. Slipping her hand into her pocket where she kept her wand, she turned. 

The figure was a man wearing a loose-fitting blue tunic with short sleeves, baggy black trousers and worn boots. A deep blue, nearly black, cowl hooded his face but she could just make out the reflective glint of dark glasses in the gloom of the hood. Minerva pulled herself up to her full twelve year old height.

“Can I help you?” she asked primly. She had never seen this stranger before but he clearly was a wizard. No one else would wear such archaic clothing (even if it wasn't a proper robe like they had back at Hogwarts). Was he a member of the Ministry, here to make sure she didn't break the Statute of Secrecy Act? Surely doing her homework in the field hadn’t been a breach of the act. 

The man tilted his head, eyeing her as if she was a new and interesting specimen for study.

“And here I thought all of the old hag’s bloodline had given up on the arcane.”

Minerva frowned. He confirmed he was a wizard, but he was being so… so blatant! She disregarded the idea he was a member of the Ministry but that just left the question of who he was. Her mother's family, Ross, which had cut her off when she married a muggle, was an old and well-renowned bloodline within the wizarding community. So what did he mean about giving up on magic?

“Excuse me sir, but I don’t know who you are,” she said before adding in a furtive whisper, “and you are going to get us both in trouble, talking so obviously about magic like that. What if a muggle hears you?”

The man raised a hand. A faint crackle of blue tinged energy warped the air around his fingers. As he did so there was a matching shimmer in the air forming a bubble around the tree where she had been sat. Minerva stared in awe. Wandless magic was a highly advanced skill. No doubt the silencing charm he had placed on the area was equally high level magic. Fear and apprehension was forgotten in the face of potential information. She stuck her hand out to the wizard.

“My name is Minerva McGonagall. Are you a friend of my mother’s? I would be very interested to talk to you about magic theory if you have the time.”

The man looked at her hand and then back to her face. His shoulders started to quake with silent laughter. He reached up and took the dark glasses from his face revealing piercing grey eyes.

“By Hoots, you’re just like the old hag as well.” he said, shaking his head. He pushed himself away from the tree and accepted her offered handshake. “Ralathor, grave hermit of Cowdenbeath.”

“Who do you mean when you say ‘old hag’?” she asked curiously when he released her hand. She narrowed her eyes in suspicion Cowdenbeath was a long way from Caithness, which meant he had come here with a specific purpose. Her mother had given up her wand when she married Father, but Minerva didn't want to think of her as old, and she certainly wasn’t going to let this stranger - this hermit - call her mother a hag.

“An ancestor of yours,” Ralathor said vaguely. “I promised to keep an eye on her brood over the years. Rona McGongal,” he added when he saw her furrowed brow.

“I don't have any relatives called Rona. And my name is McGonagall, not McGongal.” Not to mention the McGonagalls were all muggles. But could they have had a distant witch relative in the past? If so, how did this stranger know of it?

The hermit shrugged, “It was over nine hundred and fifty odd years ago. Spellings changed, the clan grew and diminished and grew again. But you’re her blood, true enough.”

The young girl frowned further. The strange man spoke in riddles and nonsense. He spoke as if he had known this apparent ancestor of hers personally and yet he seemed to be not much younger than her father. 

And yet... 

Suddenly, caught up in an idea, she went to her bag and pulled out her history of magic homework. This man was clearly a powerful wizard and had been around a long time. What better person to check her work than someone who lived it! It wasn’t cheating; it was making use of a primary source material. She sat down beside the tree and reached up to tug his leg, to make him sit beside her. Clearly amused, the strange hermit obliged.

“Would you mind looking over this? I want to make sure I wrote an accurate description of the witch trials from a wizarding perspective.” She passed him the parchment scroll that was filled by her neat script along with her textbook. She completely missed the look of confusion from the hermit as he looked over her work. As she picked up her charms paper she was only partially aware of him opening her textbook and flipping through its pages. His muttering barely registered to her as she tried to tackle a difficult question on the merits between using  _ Alohomora _ instead of  _ Liberare _ on a locked chest. It was, however, impossible for her to miss when the hermit gave a savage curse. Minerva jumped, her quill suddenly skittering across her homework and leaving an ugly black stain that slowly obscured her hard work. She turned and scowled at the irate hermit.

“What was that for? Now I’m going to have to write it all out again!” she gestured to her ruined charms homework. With an irritated flick of his hand, pale blue runes flashed into existence before fading into wisps in the air. The ink staining her homework lifted off the paper like a black smoke before fading to nothing. She looked from the hermit to her homework. He had even fixed her spelling mistakes; few though they were. Setting her quill and parchment down she turned and sat up on her knees to better look at the hermit. Just because he had fixed her homework didn't mean that she was not annoyed at him for ruining it in the first place. Folding her arms she gave him a stubborn look that demanded explanation.

However, despite her indignance the wizard refused to give her an answer or even look at her, glaring off into the distance instead. The pair remained sat in a battle of maddening silence and growing irritation whilst the bubble of silence around them kept any from approaching and any sound disturbing those within it. Little Minerva had thought she could out-stubborn anyone; her teachers had often commented that she refused to budge from a point until she was satisfied. Yet this hooded hermit that had turned up out of the blue seemed to have missed the owl that she was meant to be the stubborn one. She was forced to concede defeat.

“I didn’t think it was that bad,” the girl muttered grumpily, turning her back on the hermit. She picked up her charms homework and began to write fiercely. The nib of her quill scratched on the rough parchment surface, neat writing dissolving into angry scrawling. Pausing, she re-read what she had just written and growling at her own frustration angrily scribbled it out. Before she could finish, another heat haze shimmered in the air and the letters rearranged themselves. Her angry scrawl wriggled on the page to spell out a new message in a long and elegant hand.

_ True evil is to hold the power to change something and doing nothing instead. Was it the magicless who were evil for the deaths… or the magical who did nothing. _

Minerva frowned at the words and then looked over her shoulder. The hermit had her textbook open in his lap. She could make out the woodcut prints detailing the medieval witch burnings, and how any true witch or wizard would simply freeze the flames to avoid a fiery fate. She knew that at the bottom of the page was a footnote admitting the unfortunate countless muggle deaths caused by the burnings.

“Are you saying wizardkind are evil because we didn’t stop the witch trials?”

“Are you saying that they weren’t?”

Minerva puffed out her cheeks. “That’s why we have the Statute of Secrecy, because if people know about us they want a magical solution to their problems and then get angry if we don’t and it just makes everything worse.”

“Do you truly believe that,” he asked darkly, turning to face her though his face was hidden in shadow, “or are you just parroting the feeble justification created by old men?”

“We have rules for a reason!” Minerva said hotly. How dare this stranger speak like that, implying that she and all other witches and wizards were evil purely for existing and living their lives. The wizarding world had worked hard to maintain its separation from the muggle one; she had seen how unhappy it had made her mother to give up her magic to be with a muggle but it made sense. Rules kept you safe. If they had had the Statute of Secrecy back then maybe there wouldn’t have been any witch trials. A sudden thought occurred to her and she let the thought fly without thinking it through. “Besides, if you’re so old and you were there, why didn’t  _ you  _ do anything to stop it?”

The silence that engulfed the area around the tree shifted. Where once there was the silence of a summer’s peace, broken only by whimsical bird call, there now was a sudden chill; the hush of a graveyard in midwinter. There was a barely perceptible crackle in the air and Minerva realised that she had very likely just signed her own death warrant. She would not give the wizard the pleasure of watching her tremble though. She scrambled to her feet as the dark hooded hermit of Cowdenbeath rose in a single fluid motion. Holding her head high she looked into the cold grey eyes of the hermit. Setting her chin she folded her arms and silently dared him to prove her wrong. She saw him raise a hand; blue crackling power already dancing about his fingertips. This was it, she was going to die. She closed her eyes tightly and wished she had gotten the chance to say goodbye to her family, to hear her father play the pipes one last time, get to see her little brothers be sorted at Hogwarts…

There was a sudden bang as the bubble of silence collapsed and the ambient noise suddenly rushed in to fill the quiet void. Minerva opened her eyes. The hermit was gone, her homework still scattered upon the ground where it had been cast aside.Looking around, she couldn't see even a glimpse of the dark blue trim. Taking a deep breath and counting to ten, Minerva steadied her nerves. Calm once more, she set about picking up her homework scrolls and textbooks. She honestly hoped that they hadn’t gotten damaged with the rough treatment they had endured. The only reminder that the encounter had happened at all was curled handwriting at the bottom of her charms essay.

In the years and decades that followed, Minerva McGonagall allowed the incident to fade from her mind. She had kept the cryptic message; torn from the bottom of the parchment before she had handed the scroll in at the start of the new term. During her tenure in the Ministry of Magic she had found the long forgotten scrap of paper and it had sparked a month long private investigation to find any mention of a wizard by the name of Ralathor (and even any spelling close to that, remembering what he had said about time altering names). Nothing. When she took up her position as transfiguration teacher at Hogwarts she was reminded again. Once again she searched the archives and school records for any trace of Ralathor of Cowdenbeath, as well as any reference to Rona McGongal. She was finally rewarded with a tiny scrap of truth; the founders of Hogwarts were aided with resources and spells from the matriarch of Clan McGongal. That was it, the only piece of information to confirm that the blasted hermit existed or had told her the truth.

Then came the first wizarding war and she put such mysteries from her mind.

Then Came the Boy Who Lived and the Second wizarding war. 

She was too focused on protecting her students to go chasing ghost stories. It wasn’t until years later that she was once again reminded of grave hermit Ralathor; she had long retired from her position as head of Transfiguration to take over fully as Headmistress of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. After all she had seen she rather liked to consider herself unflappable.

Yet entering her office to find a worn out figure lightly dozing in the visitor’s chair by her desk was enough to make even Professor McGonagall pause. It was most certainly the same man she had met decades before as a young girl in that field in Caithness. She was shocked to see that he hadn’t aged a day, though his outfit was different. Gone were the dark glasses and cowl replaced with long black hair tied in a messy ponytail and a muggle military uniform. The uniform looked well worn and scorched in places. The skin on his arms was filthy with grime and the dark rings around his eyes implied a lack of sleep that he was only now trying to catch up on. He looked like a man who had been through hell and back and was now taking advantage of the peace to recover. Professor McGonagall allowed the door to snap shut behind her with a noticeable thud. Instantly the hermit was bolt upright, energy crackling around his hand in unleashed and eager potential. As soon as he saw her he sagged back down into his seat.

The pair remained in silence, one sitting and exhausted, one standing and uncertain. Eventually with calculated steps the headmistress moved and took the seat behind her desk. Resting her elbows on its dark wood surface she clasped her hands together and gave him a critical eye.

“So,” she said.

“So,” he replied wearily.

“To what do I owe this unexpected visit?” Her eyes picked out more details up close. There was a smell of burnt hair that lingered around him and she could see the scorched and uneven end of the ponytail. A faint pulsing ring of runes encircled his wrist and she quickly recognised them as various shield charm runes (she had gotten top marks in her Study of Ancient Runes O.W.L.s). A strange red dust clung in the creases of his boots and had scattered on her desk when she had disturbed his nap. His muggle military jumpsuit had noticeable tears and concerning dark stains that surrounded them.

“I came to apologise.”

Professor McGonagall was taken aback. “What for?”

“For how I behaved. It was uncalled for.”

“You decided to wait fifty years to apologise?” she said incredulously. He looked mildly intrigued.

“Huh, only fifty years? I think that’s a record.”

“And why pray tell is that?” she asked waspishly. His mannerisms were just as infuriating as they had been when she was twelve. Yet she also had the regrettable experience to draw on that allowed her to see the bone deep weariness that added to his puzzling speech patterns. 

He didn’t answer her immediately. He rubbed a hand over his eyes, as if to dispel some of his remaining exhaustion, before glancing around her office. It was at that point she realized the portraits were suspiciously silent for there being a stranger in her office. Following his gaze she saw all the portraits still, silent, none of the spark of life of the former headmasters that she was accustomed to. He caught her accusing glance as he waved a hand.

“I’ll remove it before I go, don't worry. They were just annoying. How can you sit here surrounded by their incessant nattering?”

“It’s not that hard when you are used to it,” she said before fixing him once more with a fierce look. “Now, explain why taking fifty years to apologise is some sort of record.” _And explain how you haven't aged in that time_ , she wanted to add. After all the trouble surrounding the Horcruxes she couldn't shake the feeling that the wizard before her was a practitioner of the Dark Arts. 

“Decided to prove you wrong, went sideways to a different timeline, ended up in a different dimension after that and basically everyone I tried to help ended up dead.” He looked her squarely in the eye. "Satisfied, Minerva?”

Professor McGonagall was agape. Either this man was mad or... In all her time she had never even heard of anyone attempting to travel to different worlds; misuse of a Time Turner could easily result in an alternative timeline like he had mentioned but even if he was a pioneer in time magic there would be some sort of record of him, and yet it was as if the mysterious hermit didn’t exist.

Despite the madness of his words, she couldn’t so easily deny the obvious power he wielded so casually, as if he didn’t even realise what he was doing. A mad genius perhaps but looking at him now, all she saw was another survivor just like the rest of them.

With a flick of her wand she summoned over a decanter of malt whiskey and turned some spare parchment into a pair of crystal tumblers. Taking the decanter she poured them both a few fingers of the rich brown liquid.

“I think,” she said, picking up her glass, “you had best start at the beginning, Mr Ralathor.”

“Do you have the time? It's not a brief story.” A flick of her wand and there was the audible thunk of the lock turning in her door. The hermit shrugged and picked up his own whiskey. “Let me tell you about the 992 Unicorn invasion of Dundee…”

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written as part of my 2019 Nanowrimo as a 'what if'. After all, Gloryhammer's musical universe is set in medieval and 'futuristic' Scotland and I was curious how a certain magical school and specifically a certain Scottish witch would fit in. First time trying to write anything for the Harry Potter fandom so there was a lot of wiki diving and research so for any purists that notice errors in McGonagall's history I do apologise!
> 
> A big thank you to my beta reader and Hootsmum [Lavender_Persimmon305](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lavender_Persimmon305/pseuds/Lavender_Persimmon305) (tumblr: [tellmeoflegends](https://tellmeoflegends.tumblr.com/)).


End file.
